python del vs pandas drop

Question

I know it might be old debate, but out of pandas.drop and python del function which is better in terms of performance over large dataset?

I am

Answer 1

Summarizing a few points about functionality:

• drop operates on both columns and rows; del operates on column only.
• drop can operate on multiple items at a time; del operates only on one at a time.
• drop can operate in-place or return a copy; del is an in-place operation only.

The documentation at https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.drop.html has more details on drop's features.